


The Grasping of Earthly Tethers

by leftofrevolution



Series: The Pull of Yang [1]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depression, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Imprisonment, Murder, Post-Season/Series 03, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 11:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2650019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leftofrevolution/pseuds/leftofrevolution
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many ways to be imprisoned. There are fewer ways to be free.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Imprisonment (Zaheer)

He spent the week it took the White Lotus to set up his new prison with his hands and feet chained together, the chain looped through a ring set in the floor in the hold of one of Zaofu’s airships. A metal blindfold had been contoured over his eyes and fitted to the planes of his face, irremovable even if he did have his hands free. There were no less than three metalbenders present during the daily delivery of his food and water, one to spoon feed him the congee, the other two to stand inside the solid metal door, locked every moment they were not exiting or entering the hold. The elder Beifong checked on him every morning and evening, a fact which he only knew because he could occasionally hear echoes of her addressing the guards outside his door. They were not taking any chances of him escaping again.

The effectiveness of this did not escape the White Lotus’s notice. His last day on the airship, they drugged the congee; when he awoke sometime later, the chains—though longer and now melded to the wall—on his wrists and ankles remained. So did the blindfold, though he could feel with his hands that his new cell was as encased with metal as his last one, the door nearly as solid with only a small metal flap at the bottom through which bowls could be slid.

Several hours later, sitting on the metal bench across from the door, he heard steps outside, then the flap opening and something metal scraping across the floor. The footsteps were already beginning to recede by the time he regained his bearings enough to call out, “Excuse me.”

The footsteps stopped. Then, “What do you want?” The voice was irritated, and not one he recognized.

“I just want to know where I am being held.”

His answer was a snicker. “You would like to know, wouldn’t you?”

He refrained from retorting, _Yes, that is why I asked_ , and just waited silently.

It was not long before, “You’ve been buried. We’re so far down that what remains of your Red Lotus couldn’t find you if they dug for a thousand years.” Another snicker. “Not that any of them will bother to try. Enjoy your congee, _Zaheer_.”

He walked away before Zaheer could reply. Not that he intended to. There was nothing to say.

After all, the guard was right. He had overheard what had happened to Ghazan and Ming-Hua. They had been buried even more thoroughly than he, and they were the only ones who would have looked.

\--*--

He had hoped to spend as many of his waking hours as possible in the Spirit World, but the White Lotus had chosen his new prison well; his every attempt to project himself ended in failure. It was not a wall; walls could be torn down. It was just there was nowhere for his spirit to go. Wherever they had stashed him away, it was so spiritually barren he could not even find his way to Xai Bau’s grove.

At least, that was what he hoped. The Avatar could do many things to people’s spiritual energy that no one properly understood, and he did not know what they had done to him while he was unconscious. The fact that his bending remained made this seem unlikely, but he had no way of knowing for sure.

There were other, equally troubling possibilities, but thinking on them yielded him nothing. So he did not.

He spent the next week meditating, hovering a few inches above the metal bench a few minutes at a time until fatigue from the weight of the chains dragged him back down. It did not take long, just a few days, before this caused his restraints to chafe at his wrists and ankles, first raw, then bleeding. It did not take long, just a few days more, before he could not float and meditate at the same time, his concentration worn away by the bright, irregular scrapes of pain to the point that he had to choose between them.

He chose the meditation. Better to actually flee into his mind than let himself continue to harbor delusions of physical escape.

He did not regret. There was nothing he could do to fix what he had broken.

He did not remember. His memories were where his regrets festered.

He ignored the food brought to him for that first week. He at first amused himself with the idea that he would emulate the Monk Tang Xu and gain his sustenance from the universe through meditation, but either the universe did not feel like providing or he was not asking properly, because at the end of that week even the congee left from the previous day was starting to smell palatable. When the next guards who came down with food threatened him with force feeding if he did not start eating by himself, he obliged without being able to muster even mild irritation. He was very tired.

He wished he had read more during his few months of freedom. While the teachings and poems of the old Air Nomads had been a comfort to him during his thirteen years of captivity, they were becoming… worn. The peace they had formerly invoked in him whenever he had thought on them had grown thin and tenuous, likely to rip at the slightest mishandling.

It could not be the teachings themselves. They were ageless for a reason. It had to be him. But there came a time when he realized he had lost track of how many bowls of food the White Lotus had brought, when he realized he had no idea of how long he had been here, underground.

Would even Guru Laghima have been able to find peace bound hand and foot, locked in a metal box deep under the earth? Would Laghima have newly noticed the length of the hair on his face and head, touched his wrists now ringed by rigid scars where he expected to encounter open sores, and feel his long-sought serenity just… evaporate, into nothing. The thought felt blasphemous, but the air was stale in his lungs, he was an airbender surrounded by _dead air_ , and no matter how deeply he breathed, it did nothing to dispel the tightness in his chest. It tasted lifeless.

It was lifeless. He was going to die here. A failure, forever locked away. Alone, and deservedly so. He had made so many promises to his friends, but the only one he had kept was that they, at least, got to die free. But that was little comfort to anyone, and to them none at all.

He didn’t even notice he was sobbing until he realized how much difficulty he was having catching his breath, only after that marking the tears running down his face. His attempts at wiping them away abruptly reminded him of the metal blindfold. Reminded him. Had he grown so accustomed to his blindness that it no longer registered as strange? Had he truly accepted that he would never see again? Had he truly accepted this… existence?

He could not call it a life. But neither could he imagine anything else, anymore.

\--*--

More time passed. He did not try to guess how much, and he did not ask.

He did not regret. He did not remember. He did not think or meditate. The teachings of the Air Nomads no longer brought him relief from the hopelessness of his cell; there was nowhere to retreat to in his mind that he wanted to go. His inner peace had proven fragile and cheap, what enlightenment he had found a farce.

He ate, because it was easier to do so than not. He slept, and was thankful he did not dream, though he occasionally awakened to find himself floating a few inches above the bench, his chains weighing heavily on his arms and legs as if his own airbending was taunting him with the memory of the freedom he had too briefly grasped. That freedom had been taken from him. The air was dead. He endured in darkness, and could no longer envision the light. And so he remained, and wondered if a being which did not live could actually die, if instead someone who perished in a spiritual void would drift forever in the black.

He perhaps would have gone on as such forever if one day the floor had not literally fallen out from under him, the metal floor crumpling away along with the stone beneath it.

He would have landed badly if he had not still been chained to the wall, his reflexes as rusted as they were and his focus so shattered. As it was, he hung awkwardly in the air from his shackles, feeling shaken and slightly ill from the pain that now radiated from shoulders and wrists so abruptly and harshly wrenched. “What..?” The harsh scratch of his own voice startled him; how long had it been since he had spoken?

He tried again. “What-“

“ _Shh_.”

That voice…

“… Ghazan?”

“I said, ‘ _shh_.’ We’re trying to be quiet here. Now just… a second…”

He felt hands on his left ankle, heard Ghazan (by the spirits, Ghazan was _alive_ ) take a deep breath, then a few seconds later heard a sharp creak as the shackle was ripped away. The bonds on his other ankle and his wrists quickly followed, dropping him heavily to the ground as the last shackle broke even with Ghazan braced beneath him to help ease his fall. He was carefully set on his knees before he felt Ghazan’s hands move to cup his face.

“I’m going to try to be delicate about this… if the White Lotus is scared enough to leave you blindfolded, I’m not going to take any chances for how fancy they got with this thing.” He heard Ghazan take another deep breath, then the blindfold just… peeled away, as if it were made of cloth instead of metal. And for the first time in a very long time, Zaheer opened his eyes-

“Wait, don’t-!“

And immediately regretted it.

Ghazan moved quickly to clap his hands over Zaheer’s face, one shielding his eyes while the other clamped tightly over his lips, though not quickly enough to prevent his sharp, involuntary gasp of pain or the tears that gathered in a futile attempt to block out the unforgiving light. He had seen when he thought he never would again… and it _burned_.

He heard Ghazan curse softly. “Shit, and that’s from just my lamp…” He felt Ghazan remove the hand over his mouth, then the draft caused by its movement as it was carefully lowered to clasp his own. “Zaheer, you need to cover your own eyes. I’m going to bend the floor of your cell back into shape to throw off your guards, but I need both of my hands for that.”

He took a deep breath and nodded, allowing their fingers to briefly intertwine before he released his grip. He quickly replaced Ghazan’s remaining hand on his face with the crook of his arm as Ghazan moved away, though unfortunately even with them shut, that brief moment without cover was agony, causing further tears to fall from the corners of his eyes. He heard further creaking followed closely by a rumbling sound as Ghazan presumably bended back the floor, and then felt a hand yet again grasping and tightening around his.

“Come on. We’re leaving.”

He squeezed Ghazan’s hand back in reply. It still hurt too much to open his eyes, but he let himself be pulled to his feet, and as Ghazan began to walk away, he followed, for it never occurred to him to not trust Ghazan to lead him away from the darkness and towards the wind and the sun.


	2. Rescue (Ghazan)

He woke up, and within a breath found himself wishing he hadn’t. It was not a good sign when just the simple act of inhaling left him with the feeling of a knife sliding between his ribs.

Even opening his eyes hurt. It didn’t even do him a lot of good, as the only light seemed to be a dim, silvery-blue glow positioned somewhere around his stomach, which didn’t help much when he was flat on his back on a slab of rock. Trying to raise his head to see the source of the glow proved both impossible and hell on his neck, and he quickly gave up the endeavor with a sigh that he instantly regretted as it sent another stabbing pain piercing through his chest, his breath ending on a shuddering gasp.

He had meant to die. How had he managed to mess that up?

It was only with the shuffle of cloth that he realized someone else was there, the sound of someone else’s breathing barely audible over the pounding in his ears.

“Ghazan.”

Ming-Hua. Ming-Hua was alive? How? Hadn’t Mako killed her? He’d been so sure- firebending did not lend itself to nonlethal takedowns, and then with his collapse of the cavern, how had she-

“Ghazan!” She was above him now, looking harried and ragged in the dim light, but definitely still kicking, and seemingly in much better shape than he was. Good. If he had seriously hurt her, he wasn’t sure he would have been able to forgive himself.

He grinned up at her, which also hurt, but he was beginning to accept that literally everything would for at least the foreseeable future. “Hey, Ming-Hua. How’s it going?”

The pain was also worth it, to see the tightness around her mouth and eyes ease just a little bit. “Terribly. Don’t move. You’re just going to make it worse.”

He breathed in again carefully, the act making him acutely aware of every rib and the fact that he currently had about twice as many as was usually advised. “What’s ‘it’?”

“Everything.”

He took a minute to think on this, during which time she disappeared from his field of vision and the glow near his stomach slightly brightened.

“How are we alive?”

Down by his stomach he heard an exasperated groan. “If I tell you, will you stop talking? Which also isn’t doing you any favors, by the way.”

“… Sure.”

Another minute passed, though only the sound of dripping water gave him any way to tell. The glow by his stomach remained steady.

“That Mako kid and I during our fight ended up in the underground pond below the caverns. I thought I had him dead to rights, but it turned out he’s a lightning bender. Little jerk took me out with one shot. I woke up an hour ago, still half submerged in the water and with most of the ceiling caved in, or melted. Your handiwork, I assume.

“Don’t answer that.

“Anyway, the collapse had blocked my exit, so I looked around for a while trying to find another way out. I didn’t find one, but I found you, half trapped under a boulder and surrounded by crusted over lava just inches away. You got lucky there. Well, except for the hair.

“The boulder wasn’t too big and it wasn’t holding up anything, so I rolled it off you and dragged you over here where it’s a little flatter and drier.

“I’ve been waiting for you to wake up for a while now.”

Lucky was right. Damn. He was surprised he’d ever woken up at all. Except… maybe not so lucky. “Sorry, Ming-Hua, but I don’t think I’ll be bending us out of here anytime soon.” If ever. “I can’t feel my legs.”

“That’s because they’ve been mostly crushed. I’ll start on them after I’ve made sure all of your major organs are in one piece and you have a working ribcage. And stop talking!”

That… what? Ming-Hua didn’t know how to heal. She, like the rest of them, had been self-taught, and she’d mentioned a while ago that learning to heal had never become a priority. “You don’t-“

“I’m figuring it out as I go. And if you don’t shut up _right now_ , I’ll break your jaw and save healing it until last.”

Ming-Hua was not one to make idle threats, so he stilled his tongue and concentrated on his breathing. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. Repeat ad nauseam and try not to black out. Focusing on the pain, perversely, made it slightly less awful. Made him feel like he was more in control, like he was just engaging in some masochistic meditative exercise to give himself a heightened awareness of his body. Zaheer would have approved.

Zaheer.

He nearly risked the broken jaw to ask Ming-Hua if she knew what had happened, but she’d been taken out even before he’d brought down the cavern. She wouldn’t know. The last either of them had seen of Zaheer was him flying out through the hole in the cavern’s ceiling, Avatar Korra in raging, fiery pursuit.

The poison had been doing its work, but no one could stand a chance against an Avatar in the Avatar State. The only question was whether Zaheer had managed to evade her long enough for the mercury to take full effect, and no matter how impressive Zaheer’s new abilities, Ghazan was terrifying uncertain about the answer.

They had already lost P’Li, and Ghazan knew they would never truly recover from that, her absence an open wound he had felt keenly and with unexpected sharpness even in the few hours between her death and his latest fight against Bolin. Losing Zaheer as well was… unthinkable.

So he didn’t think on it—no point, Zaheer was strong, if they’d managed to survive there was no way he wouldn’t—and went back to concentrating on his breathing.

The idea of being Ming-Hua’s guinea pig mouse for ‘figuring out’ healing was not a comforting one—the art was not known to respond well to brute-force experimentation—but it wasn’t like they had many options. Ming-Hua was unlikely to be able to escape by herself without causing another collapse, and even if she did, the Avatar’s allies had tracked them down. It was doubtful they would have access to the airship they had commandeered, and they were over a hundred miles and several mountain ranges away from the closest town. That was not a distance Ming-Hua would be able to cover on her own without supplies, which they did not have access to without their airship. And in this scenario he was dead anyway, which was not as appealing a thought now that he had seen before him the possibility of a future that didn’t involve going back to prison.

So gambling on Ming-Hua teaching herself healing well enough in the next few days to get him on his feet was pretty much all they had.

Fortunately, Ming-Hua was a prodigy in addition to being as stubborn as hell, and it could not have been more than a few hours before the pain of breathing through knives faded to a dull, manageable ache. Which was good, because it was at that point that Ming-Hua fell over, the faint glow of her bending fading away and plunging them into darkness.

“Ming-Hua!” Even in light (ha) of Ming-Hua’s recent efforts, leveraging himself up onto his elbows still proved a mistake when the attempt revealed to him that his left arm was broken, the feeling of bone twisting unnaturally enough to cause bile to rise in his throat. His body made an aborted attempt at curling around the injury before it caught on to the fact that he still couldn’t feel his legs. “Son of a-!”

“Told you… not to move. Or talk. Idiot.”

The relief nearly punched the air out of him. “You alright?”

Even her sigh dripped with exhaustion. “Sort of. Tired.”

“Yeah, of course you are. You should sleep.”

“Trying.”

Except it quickly became evident that in addition to providing light, the act of healing him had also produced most of the ambient heat in the cave, and that was rapidly being leeched away by the walls. They weren’t wet, thanks to Ming-Hua, but they were still stuck in a damp mountain cave in the northernmost part of the Earth Kingdom at the tail end of autumn. He was already starting to shiver, and even with a waterbender’s resistance to cold taken into account, Ming-Hua weighed perhaps half of what he did and had no body fat to spare.

It took a bit of work to drag Ming-Hua on top of him when he only had one working arm, but she had fortunately collapsed on his right side and didn’t fight him when he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled. Her skin was cold to the touch at first, but she quickly warmed, and she was careful not to jolt his left arm when she shifted into a more comfortable position.

“You are… the lumpiest bed… I’ve ever slept on.”

He grinned against the fall of her hair. “Shh. Blankets don’t talk.”

By some miracle, they both did manage to get some sleep, and in the morning (evening? He didn’t know how much time they’d spent unconscious), after bending both of them some clean water to drink, Ming-Hua resumed her healing efforts.

If he had thought his chest hurt, getting his legs fixed was excruciating. Feeling returned to them before Ming-Hua was even half done setting the bones, so it was something of a mercy when he fainted and didn’t regain consciousness until Ming-Hua was done for the day. His legs ached, but it felt much like his chest had when Ming-Hua had finished healing up his ribs; that soreness had faded sometime while they slept, so he considered it a good sign, or at least not a bad one.

Ming-Hua slept across him again that... he was going to stick with night. The previous day he had been too tired himself to notice, but she was bony enough that she really did make a terrible blanket. But she was still warm, and if it weren’t for the broken arm, and his worries about Zaheer, and his still-raw and cutting grief whenever his thoughts drifted to P’Li, and the fact that neither he nor Ming-Hua had eaten in two days- okay, he didn’t have enough imagination to twist this into something actually pleasant, but they weren’t dead, they weren’t going back to prison, and they were together. He had not run out of hope quite yet.

The next morning it became evident that Ming-Hua had in fact gone straight past ‘figuring out’ healing into the realm near-mastery, as when she maneuvered the bones of his left arm back into place and mended the break, he didn’t even feel a twinge. He did stagger a little when he pushed himself to his feet, but stretching quickly proved that the result of stiff muscles and not any damage they had both overlooked.

“Good?”

He turned to Ming-Hua with a grin. “Better than ever. Thanks, Ming-Hua.” In the abating light of Ming-Hua’s healing, he carefully checked his footing before widening his stance. “Now it’s my turn.”

He could hear the smirk in Ming-Hua’s voice as she said, “Yeah, yeah. Just remember to take us out the back. _Quietly_ , if you can. It’s been at least a few days; the mountain might already be swarming with White Lotus.”

She couldn’t see it, but he nodded sharply; he knew what they were up against as well as she. Then he reached out his arms, slowly exhaled as he turned his focus outward, and _pulled_.

\--*--

Their caution proved unnecessary; the Avatar’s friends had already left, and the White Lotus was nowhere in sight. Neither was their airship, or the Avatar. Or Zaheer. All that remained to give any clue as to what had transpired was an impressively battered landscape, and-

“ _Shit_.”

Ghazan jogged over to where Ming-Hua stood near the collapsed entrance to the caverns, her eyes wide in startling rage, riveted on the ground. “What? What is it?” Then he followed her gaze down. For a moment he didn’t comprehend what he was looking at; then the full force of it dropped him to his knees. “ _No_.”

They had worked so hard. They had given up so much. Endless training. Countless injuries. Thirteen years spent in their own individual hells. P’Li's _life_.

They had sacrificed everything.

And the puddle of mercury in front of them was almost certain proof that it had all come to nothing. That the Avatar yet lived.

Ming-Hua’s voice broke him out of his daze. “It had to be one of the Beifongs. Only a skilled metalbender could have removed the poison.”

“Yeah.”

“If Zaheer is alive, either he thinks we’re dead and made a run for it, or they have him. We need to get to a working radio; there is no way they wouldn’t announce the death or capture of the Earth Queen’s killer even if the White Lotus doesn’t want to acknowledge our existence. We can make further plans when we know which it is.” He heard her turn and start to walk away; when he did not immediately follow, her steps faltered, then stopped. “Ghazan?”

“It was all pointless, wasn’t it.” His hands had started shaking the moment he had seen the puddle and known what it meant, and now they wouldn’t stop. “All we’ve done. All we’ve been through. P’Li is _dead_ -“

Ming-Hua jerked him to his feet with an icy grip on the back of his robe and snarled in his face, “And we will _not_ follow. We’re going to get off this mountain. We’re going to find Zaheer. And we’re going to live our lives, _free_. To do anything else would be insulting, to P’Li most of all.”

Ghazan could only shake his head. “We can’t go back to the Red Lotus. We failed.”

Ming-Hua grinned with all her teeth, looking wild and more than a little unhinged. It still managed to be one of the most comforting sights he had ever seen, to know that she could still manage to stand tall and force him to stand beside her. “So we’ll make our own way.”

\--*--

Their own way began with finding some food. Ming-Hua remembered her father’s teachings on hunting from her days in the Northern Water Tribe, and it did not take long before she tracked down and took out a fox antelope about a mile down the mountain. It was then that they encountered their latest roadblock, because neither of them knew how to start a fire. They had both been raised in cities, the Red Lotus when had they trained with them had always provided food, and when they had been on the lam, they had survived off of a combination of dried goods, a still-working gas stove they’d found in an abandoned apartment in Republic City, and P’Li (who was also the only one of them who knew how to cook beyond ‘don’t burn it’).

It turned out fox antelope skewered on a stick and roasted over a bubbling pool of lava did not taste too bad as long as you hadn’t eaten in three days and didn’t mind the smell of rotten eggs.

Finding their way to civilization proved a little more problematic; Ghazan could theoretically earthbend the both of them the distance to the nearest town in a couple of days if he didn’t mind exhausting himself, but all of their maps had been on the airship. Ming-Hua’s best recollection of where the closest town was located was no better than ‘about a hundred miles south-ish of what remains of the Northern Air Temple,’ and Ghazan had nothing better besides also suggesting they stop at the top of each mountain in their path to try and get a view of where they were going.

It was thus five days later—long since sick of bugs, getting hopelessly lost, and the taste of rotten egg-flavored fox antelope—that they finally staggered into the valley community of Kei Zan, which turned out to be unfortunately prosperous. Even standing at the edge of what appeared to be a poorer district, Ghazan was made painfully aware that from the state of their clothes and hair, they looked like they had been through a war, then forced to sleep on the ground for a week. Both of these things were true, but that didn’t mean they wanted everyone to notice.

At least they didn’t smell; traveling with a waterbender meant never having to go without a bath. But they still wouldn’t be able to go into Kei Zan without attracting a lot of unwanted attention.

He turned to Ming-Hua. “Any ideas?”

“Find an inn on the outskirts of town, tell them we were robbed on the road, buy a room for the next three days to give us time to regroup and listen to the radio, and pay the innkeeper to track us down a few sets of new clothes.”

He stared at her incredulously. “With what money?”

Wordlessly, Ming-Hua pulled a knotted-closed pouch out from under one of her sashes and tossed it to him. It landed heavily in his hand with an audible _clink_. Without even opening it, he could tell it was full of solid gold coins. Gold had a very… particular feel.

“Where did you get these?”

Ming-Hua shrugged. “Turns out there was a lot of cash in the Earth Queen’s treasury. Who knew?”

 _Zaheer wouldn’t approve_ , was his first thought. Except that wasn’t quite right. Zaheer had been vocal about his disgust for the evils committed in pursuit of wealth, but he had also shown himself on more than one occasion to be a pragmatist. The money in the pouch didn’t amount to one-thousandth of what Ming-Hua could have taken; this had obviously been just a precaution, and recent events proved it a sensible one.

So instead Ghazan said, “Good thinking. So what are we going to be this time? Newlyweds on our honeymoon?”

“Oh shut up.”

\--*--

They ended up going with cousins on a trip to see family to the east—which was close enough to justify the shared room without raising any eyebrows as to the separate beds—even though it meant Ming-Hua would have to hide her bending while they were in town to avoid arousing anyone’s interest. There had been enough problems with bandits in the area recently that their story of being robbed was accepted without question, and within the hour Ghazan found himself wrapped in a new robe, happily inhaling a bowl of leek and turkey duck stew. Sitting across from him at the tiny table in their room, Ming-Hua followed suit, though she skipped the spoon entirely and just poured the stew directly into her mouth.

A few minutes later, the bowls lay empty before them, and Ghazan leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “That is the second best thing I have ever eaten.”’

“Best thing was the first thing you ate after Zaheer broke you out?”

He winked at her. “You know it. Those pau buns will live in my memories forever.”

Ming-Hua nodded in assent. “I can still taste that glass of mango juice. It might as well have been Spirit World nectar, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.”

For a moment, they grinned at each other, but the good mood was quickly broken as they both remembered why they were able to make those kinds of jokes at all. “Shit. We need to find Zaheer.”

Ming-Hua nodded again, this time more gravely. “Yeah. We have enough cash that you can buy a radio and we’ll still be good for a while.” She eyed him critically. “Some of it should probably be spent on a haircut. I did what I could with the burnt ends, but it still looks like you had your hair chopped off at the shoulder with a blunt knife.”

Ghazan grinned again. “Will do, but I have an idea that I think will save us some time, at least when it comes to learning what happened to Zaheer.”

\--*--

“So you left your hometown right after learning about the Earth Queen’s death?”

Ghazan nodded and tried to look somber. “Yeah. Meng and I thought it a good time to go see our grandmother. We didn’t know if we’d get another chance.”

The innkeeper’s wife nodded sympathetically. “I understand. In times of tragedy, that is when we most desire to be close to the ones we love.”

“Exactly. But that means we haven’t heard any news since then. This town has to have radios; do you know if they ever caught the revolutionaries who did it?”

The innkeeper’s wife looked thoughtful. “Supposedly most of them are dead. They arrested the leader though. A rogue airbender; imagine it! Avatar Aang must be rolling in his grave.”

“Horrible,” Ghazan agreed, not letting his terrible relief make itself known on his face. So Zaheer was alive. Captured again, but that could be fixed. He had freed them; they owed it to him to return the favor. “How do you even hold someone like that?”

The woman shrugged. “Last I heard he was being detained at Zaofu by the Metal Clan. But he wouldn’t be there anymore; Suyin Beifong has always been very adamant about her city having no prisons. Beyond that, I have no idea. No one has ever had to imprison an airbender before.”

Ghazan nodded thoughtfully before bowing to her. “Thank you. It is good to know our queen’s murderers have been brought to justice.”

She gave a shallow bow in return, obviously pleased with his manners. “I am always happy to help. Should you need anything, just ask.”

“That is most gracious.” A thought occurred. “Do you know a good barber?”

\--*--

Even when focusing most of her attention on their new radio, Ming-Hua took the time to smirk at him every few minutes.

“Shut up. The guy said short hair and clean shaven are fashionable right now, and I thought it’d better for us if I look like everyone else. We don’t want the White Lotus to get word of people fitting our exact descriptions wandering around the Earth Kingdom, even if we are supposed to be dead.

“In fact, maybe you should-“

“Not a chance.”

Ghazan shrugged. “Can I at least comb your hair and put it up? It’s starting to resemble an elephant rat’s nest, and you would at least look a little different with-“

“No.” Seeing his startled expression at the harshness of her tone, Ming-Hua made a visible effort to soften her words as she said, “P’Li… always did that for me.”

“Well, as fond as she was of the bald look on Zaheer, I don’t think you could quite pull it off, which is really your only option if you never want your hair to be brushed again.”

Ming-Hua didn’t look at him, determinedly focusing her stare on the radio.

“Ming-Hua, please don’t make me pull the ‘P’Li thought your hair was beautiful and wouldn’t want it to look like an elephant rat’s nest’ card.”

That at least made the corner of her mouth quirk up, though she still didn’t look at him. “I think you just did.”

“Well, is it working?”

She sighed and finally glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “Just go get the damn comb. And don’t think having short hair now means you can pretend that you’ve forgotten how to deal with knots.”

\--*--

The radio confirmed what the innkeeper’s wife had told him; unfortunately it didn’t give them anything else.

“So now we just have to find him.”

Braiding was harder than P’Li had made it look; Ghazan was already on his third attempt, and Ming-Hua distracting him with talking wasn’t helping. “How? We can’t sneak into Zaofu again; they found out about Aiwei, so the tunnel must be blocked off by now. And everyone I can think of who would know where Zaheer is are public figures and decent in a fight; I’m not sure there is anyone we could capture, question, and then take out without it being noticed.”

“The White Lotus has no reason to hide from its members where they’ve taken him,” Ming-Hua pointed out. “They think we’re dead, and they’d be aware from talking to Korra how the Red Lotus deals with its failures. We- _they_ wouldn’t rescue him even if they did know his location. So…”

Ghazan quickly caught on to her line of thinking. “So we know of the location of several White Lotus bases. We wait a few weeks to make sure the information has spread, grab a guard on patrol at one of the smaller strongholds, interrogate him, then disappear him with no sign of our involvement. With any luck, they’ll think a platypus bear got him, or bandits.”

Ming-Hua turned her head to smirk at him. “Exactly.” Unfortunately this had the unintended side effect of pulling her hair from his grip, ruining his braiding attempt.

Ghazan sighed. “Face forward again, will you? I’ve got to get this down eventually.”

\--*--

It took two guards, at two separate White Lotus locations. The first had been a new recruit who didn’t know anything, and they didn’t want to risk drawing attention by taking out two White Lotus at the same location.

They had managed to purchase a used Satomobile in Kei Zan along with supplies, but it still took several weeks to get to the first White Lotus base. They decided to lie low for a while after that in order to prevent the White Lotus from noticing a pattern in recent guard disappearances, and it still took another week of driving to get from the first White Lotus stronghold to the second.

All told, nearly three months had passed since their defeat in the caverns near the Northern Air Temple by the time they managed to pummel the location of Zaheer’s new prison out of a guard. That taken care of, Ming-Hua slit his throat and they dumped the body—tied to a heavy rock and stripped of all White Lotus regalia—in a fast moving river twenty miles downstream from the base.

The news wasn’t good.

“Buried half a mile beneath an inactive volcano on the southern edge of the Earth Kingdom, chained up and locked in a metal cell, surrounded by a legion of metalbenders and firebenders.” Standing by the riverbed a further ten miles away from the White Lotus base, Ghazan shook his head in disbelief. “We are so fucked.”

Ming-Hua frowned thoughtfully. “We know where the plans for the prison’s construction are located. We should start by stealing them, making a copy, then returning them before their absence is noticed. If we know his cell’s exact location within the volcano-“

“We can’t do shit. I’m not a metalbender, and lavabending is about as subtle as a rock thrown at your head. Or, you know, less, because then at least there is more than one person who could have done it who isn’t a close, personal friend of the _Avatar_.

“If I just melt Zaheer out of his cell, the White Lotus will know it was us. Lavabending is just too distinctive, and if I survived, they’ll assume you did too. We can’t afford to let them find out we’re alive. Zaheer will be hard enough to hide on his own, but releasing a bulletin with a description of the three of us would have every bounty hunter in the world breathing down our necks. We can’t live like that, and I’m tired of running.” He did not raise the possibility of them splitting up to more easily evade pursuit. That was nearly as unimaginable as not attempting to break Zaheer out at all.

Ming-Hua did not seem fazed by his rant. If anything, she seemed rather amused. “You know there is an obvious solution to that particular problem.”

Ghazan blinked. She couldn’t possibly think-

“Did you not hear me? I’m _not_ a metalbender.”

Her expression remained placid. “Have you ever tried?”

“No, but only one in a hundred earthbenders can metalbend. Even if by some miracle I turned out to be one of them, the only practitioners who could teach me are in Republic City or Zaofu. We are _not_ returning to either of those places; we’d be arrested on sight.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that we do. You should just teach yourself.”

“Metalbending went undiscovered by earthbenders for thousands of years. I barely know the basic idea behind it. How would I even start to ‘teach myself’?”

Ming-Hua shrugged. “The same way we’ve taught ourselves everything we know. When it becomes necessary, we figure it out. Sometimes in three days, buried alive in a dark cave while the self-destructive jerk who got you stuck there is dying at your feet.”

He stared at her. “That… wasn’t subtle.”

She shrugged again. “No point using a stiletto when you have a sledgehammer. At least you have longer than I did; for some reason, the White Lotus really likes keeping their enemies alive. Probably a holdover from that whole deal with Fire Lord Ozai. You can take some time.

“Just… don’t take too long.”

Ghazan nodded grimly, knowing that both of them were thinking of Zaheer in chains, half a mile beneath the earth, with no expectation of ever being rescued. Hope and their purpose had been what kept them going in prison; Zaheer no longer had either. “I’ll… try. Even if I do figure it out, though, it might take a while before I’m comfortable enough with it to attempt staging a rescue. What are you going to be doing with all that time?”

“Well…” Ming-Hua gazed off into the distance. “If we don’t want to run forever, then we need somewhere to go. I was thinking a farm.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Really?”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

“I don’t know how to farm. You weren’t raised within a thousand miles of a farm. If Zaheer knows anything about farming, it’s from a book and is actually a metaphor for enlightenment.”

She grinned that slightly mad grin that he loved so much about her. “Exactly. What was it Zaheer used to say? ‘The best place to hide is in plain sight, because that is where no one thinks to look.’”

Ghazan thought about it. “That… makes a surprising amount of sense.”

“I thought so.”

“I am still one-hundred percent sure that you are misquoting him.”

“Well, I never understood half of what he said anyway.”

\--*--

It turned out he was naturally sensitive to impurities in metals—“Told you.” “Shut up, Ming-Hua.”—which at least explained why he had always been able to sense gold so clearly, but the actual process of using those impurities to bend the metal proved more elusive. Meanwhile, Ming-Hua investigated a large, isolated village on the eastern edge of the Earth Kingdom, and through some radio communiques managed to confirm that there were a few dozen untended acres of fertile land up for sale that sounded appealingly remote from the village itself (and surprisingly well within their budget; it turned out that even a couple pounds of the Earth Queen’s gold went a long way).

They headed eastwards towards the village in their Satomobile, Ming-Hua driving while he practiced his metalbending with a piece of ore they had bought as a souvenir in one of the weirder Earth Kingdom towns on their way. By the time they arrived several weeks later—having only taken a brief detour to sneak into one of the White Lotus’s libraries and make a copy of the layout of Zaheer’s prison—he had managed to crush it into a small brick and was feeling quite pleased with himself; Ming-Hua herself had spent the time thinking up their new, likely permanent identities.

“If we’re not going to set ourselves up as hermits—which I think would attract the bad kind of attention in of itself—they’re going to notice my waterbending eventually, and we have no reason to hide your earthbending. Zaheer will have to avoid airbending in front of people, but I doubt he’ll be spending that much time in town anyway. If we combine that with the fact that there is no way to disguise some of Zaheer’s scars or how built both of you are, I was thinking that you could both be conscripted soldiers from Ba Sing Se. You deserted immediately after the Earth Queen was killed. Zaheer can be your older, non-bending brother who stayed to try and help keep order but now wishes to leave in the wake of… let’s say his wife’s death.”

Ghazan looked at her skeptically from the passenger seat. “That seems a bit too close to home.”

“We might be living with these identities for years, Ghazan. The closer to the truth they are, the better. We don’t have a better shield against questions than having answers no one wants to hear.”

“Alright,” Ghazan ceded, “They might buy it. But where do you fit into all this?”

“Long distance girlfriend from the Northern Water Tribe. After you left Ba Sing Se, we met up and married in a private ceremony and now wish to settle down, far away from war and the chaos of a city.”

For a long moment, Ghazan couldn’t think of anything to say. Ming-Hua hadn’t quite managed to keep a straight face for the last bit, her voice gaining a distinctly sarcastic lilt on ‘chaos’ as her mouth twisted in a sardonic smirk, but as for the rest of it… “You… want that to be your long term cover identity?”

She didn’t look at him, keeping her eyes on the road. “I came up with it, didn’t I?”

Well. Okay then.

“Ming-Hua.”

She still didn’t look at him. “Yeah?”

“Could you pull over? Please?”

She didn’t immediately reply, but then shrugged easily and complied before finally turning to him. “Yeah? What…”

She trailed off as he leaned over slowly, deliberately, and raised a hand to her cheek. He let it hover about a hair’s breadth away, looking into her eyes in a silent request for permission. Her gaze flickered to the side for just a brief second; then she nodded.

Thirty seconds later, he was not entirely clear how Ming-Hua had ended up in his lap with her tongue shoved down his throat and his hands knotted in her hair, but neither did he care. What was it Zaheer had once quoted Guru Jonang as saying? “Don’t look at the teeth of an ostrich horse given as a gift?”

That wasn’t it, but whatever.

\--*--

“This,” Ghazan pronounced two months later, “is the worst honeymoon ever.”

Ming-Hua had stopped the Satomobile two miles away from the volcano, far behind the tree line of the closest patch of woods to the White Lotus prison, since most of it was surrounded by a barren, inhospitable desert. The plan was as simple as they could make it; based on the prison plans, Zaheer was buried exactly two thousand feet below the base of the volcano, closer to the north-east side than anywhere else. He was fed only once a day around noon, and otherwise the guards avoided his cell. Orders, apparently, to limit his chances of influencing them.

Ming-Hua was going to stay with the Satomobile as their getaway driver. If the alarm was raised, she would not be much help against the battalions of benders stationed in the tightly carved corridors of the volcano, and as long as she was free, that would mean they would have another shot.

The only metal Ghazan expected to encounter was the occasional iron ore deposit, Zaheer’s chains, and the cell itself, all of which were well within his abilities to bend. He was going to dig his way there from underground, aiming to arrive about an hour after noon in order to give them the longest lag time before the guards noticed Zaheer’s absence while still allowing them a margin of error. He was to free Zaheer, bend the cell as back into shape as possible to mask their escape route, then collapse the tunnel in their wake once he was sure he was far enough away it wouldn’t be overheard. If things went according to plan, they would have nearly twenty-four hours before the White Lotus noticed anything was amiss, more than long enough to get out of the state of Ho.

There were a lot of assumptions in their plan. Some, like the fact that Zaheer would be able to walk, could be worked around if they proved incorrect.

(“I can carry him, if it comes to that. I only really need one arm to bend.”

“If you’re sure.”)

Others, not so much. The White Lotus not knowing those two guards’ disappearances for what they were, for example, and acting accordingly by increasing how closely Zaheer was monitored; or worse, moving Zaheer and making sure to keep his new location so classified that he and Ming-Hua would never be able to find someone who knew it.

Another thing they were banking on with no real proof was Zaheer still being alive, nearly six months after the White Lotus had captured him. There was no way to compensate for that if they were wrong.

“I am serious, you know. You never take me anywhere nice.”

Sitting in the driver’s seat of their Satomobile and looking far more relaxed than he felt, Ming-Hua just smirked at him. “And yet you can think of nowhere else you would rather be.”

“Well, yeah, but since when does that mean I can’t complain?”

They had done all they could. The moment had come. Ghazan allowed himself one last, brief moment of weakness, and leaned back into the Satomobile to kiss Ming-Hua softly, only dragging himself away when he realized that if he lingered any longer, he might not be able to force himself to stop.

He loved her. She should know.

“I’ll come back.”

“You’d better.”

Eh, close enough.

\--*--

It turned out that bending a tunnel well over two miles long at a decently steep, constant incline was really, really difficult. They had, however, estimated the time it would take about right, so it was just past one o’clock (thank the ancestors for the invention of watches) when he found himself staring up at a solid plate of steel that, according to the prison plans, made up the floor of Zaheer’s cell. Moment of truth.

It was both better and worse than they had hoped. Zaheer was alive. Zaheer recognized him. Zaheer could walk, even if he moved like he was in pain.

That was probably because he was. A metal blindfold had been bended over his eyes shortly after he had been captured, and apparently the White Lotus had just… never gotten around to removing it. So Zaheer had been living blinded since his capture. Nearly half a year, in total darkness. The light of Ghazan’s lamp was so dim he could barely make out more than ten feet in front of him, yet Zaheer flinched from it like he was staring into the heart of the sun. Ghazan hadn’t known that Zaheer flinched away from anything. Instinctively, his free hand clenched tighter around Zaheer’s. At this point, he wasn’t sure he could let go if he tried.

Briefly, madly, Ghazan wondered if Ming-Hua would be angry at him if he decided to reignite the dormant volcano on his way out.

The harsh crack of Zaheer’s voice brought him out of it. “Ghazan.”

“…Yeah?”

“I did not know you could metalbend.”

Ghazan shrugged before remembering that Zaheer still had his eyes buried in the crook of his other arm and couldn’t see him do it. He wasn’t actually sure that Zaheer’s sight had recovered enough to have as of yet seen him at all. “It’s a new skill. We’ve had to pick up a few of those in the past few months.”

They walked on for a few more seconds.

“You said ‘we’ before as well. Does that mean- Ming-Hua-“

And for the first time in all the years he had known him, Ghazan watched Zaheer’s words fail him. Well, he couldn’t hold it against him. They were not, any of them, unchanged by what they had gone through in the past six months.

Make that thirteen years. Man their lives had sucked recently.

“Yeah, she’s fine. She’s waiting at the end of the tunnel, ready to drive us far away from here.

“We bought a farm on the far eastern side of the Earth Kingdom. No one will ever be able to find us, if we don’t let ‘em.”

The tunnel’s mouth was in sight, but Zaheer had stopped. Ghazan looked at him in concern; he could feel him trembling. “Zaheer? We have to go.”

“I did not dream.”

Ghazan wasn’t sure where Zaheer was going with this, and he didn’t have the time to try and puzzle it out. “Of escape?”

“At all.”

Well, that was ominous. “Well, you’re not dreaming now.”

“I know. I haven’t been able to imagine this in a long time.”

“Yeah, well, if you did, it probably wouldn’t hurt quite so much. That’s how you know it’s real.” He pulled at Zaheer’s hand. “Come on. Let’s get you to where you can feel the wind on your face again.”

Zaheer hesitated, which was enough on its own to nearly make Ghazan’s heart stop in his chest. But then, with movements so slow and careful they almost seemed to hurt him, Zaheer lowered the arm covering his eyes, turned to Ghazan, and nodded. It was obvious he still couldn’t see worth shit, but it lightened Ghazan’s spirits more than a little to recognize the determined cast of Zaheer’s face. “Gladly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want a visual for the beginning of this chapter, it was my vague memories of the Ming-Hua and Ghazan sketch in this post that inspired most of it, though my version has less blood and more crushing (P.S. Makani is a great artist and you should be following her anyway): http://makanidotdot.tumblr.com/post/95172860351/assorted-junk-couple-co-shenanigans-and-a


	3. Freedom (Ming-Hua)

She heard the tunnel being caved in behind them before she actually saw them, which meant she had time to rearrange herself into a more nonchalant pose before they could see the tension that had been vibrating throughout every muscle of her body for the past three hours. For all their talk of her remaining free for another attempt if something went wrong, if the White Lotus had managed to take Ghazan as well, they both knew she wouldn’t have a chance of getting them out once the White Lotus was on alert as to their survival.

If the White Lotus hadn’t seen them coming, no matter the numbers of metal and firebenders, there was no way they could hope to capture a lavabender in the bowels of a volcano, active or not. But if they had- if they were prepared, and managed to catch Ghazan unawares- well.

The idea of teaching herself bloodbending had never been terribly attractive- it was just a bit too creepy for her tastes. She had admittedly thought about it more than once in prison, but the guards had been careful to remain far out of her reach and only feed her during the day. No animals around, either, so she’d had no way of determining if she even possessed the basic capability.

That wasn’t the case anymore. If she was the only one left, the idea of giving herself a crash course, waiting for a full moon, and then killing as many of the White Lotus bastards as possible before they managed to take her out sounded almost as appealing as it had during her darkest moments in her cell.

Fortunately she didn’t have much time to go down that particularly morbid line of thought before it proved unnecessarily speculative, as it was then she caught sight of Ghazan—looking tired and grubby, but unharmed—walking towards her from the collapsed tunnel entrance, towing Zaheer in his wake.

Zaheer- did not look as unharmed as Ghazan. But he was walking, and based on the quiet sounds of talking he was cognizant, so it would have to do for now.

“Come on,” she snapped, pushing open the right-side doors of the Satomobile at their approach. “Ghazan, throw Zaheer in the back and get in. The faster we’re away from this place, the better.”

“It’s good to see you too, Ming-Hua.” The rough timbre of Zaheer’s voice made it painfully obvious he had not yet re-accustomed himself to talking, but there was a smile quirking his lips, and all of them remembered another, eerily similar volcanic prison, less than a year ago in a situation so very like this one.

Involuntarily, Ming-Hua found herself smiling back, before she shook herself and turned the ignition on the Satomobile. “Yeah, yeah. Just hurry it up.”

Ghazan obliged, though he more guided than threw Zaheer into the back before moving to sit beside her in the front. “You remember the way to the lake?”

She put the Satomobile in gear and pressed on the gas pedal, guiding them carefully across the uneven ground before they made their way out of the woods, then turning right onto a long-neglected side road. “It’s not hard to remember ‘north.’” Her nose wrinkled at the smell wafting from the backseat. “Good thing we already built making him look less like an escaped felon into our schedule. They didn’t give your prison a shower, Zaheer?” Not that she’d expected them to. Ideas like ‘humane treatment of prisoners’ seemed beyond the White Lotus.

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Bastards.”                                                                        

The lake was only a half an hour drive away, but everyone was on edge enough that the sight of it—deserted and isolated from prying eyes—was enough to cause the tension in the Satomobile to noticeably ratchet down several notches. She stopped the Satomobile a few dozen feet from the lakeside before turning off the ignition, grabbing the bag of toiletries she’d stored in the foot well, and stepping out. “Ghazan, get the clothes and the hair dye. I’ll see to Zaheer.”

Zaheer had already gotten out of the car on his own by the time she made her way around to the right side of the Satomobile, but she still guided his hand to the sleeve of her robe and wrapped his fingers around the cloth before starting towards the lake. He still had his eyes clenched shut more often than not, and when they were open, they had a clouded look to them that worried her. The worry proved well-founded when Zaheer, unseeing of the terrain change, slipped on the wet rocks at the water’s edge, forcing her to steady him with her bending. “Easy.” He exhaled slowly in an obvious effort to control a flare of frustration before nodding.

They made their way into waist-deep water without further incident, which was where things necessarily became a little awkward. “Take off your clothes.”

That caused Zaheer more than a moment’s pause, but as a credit to his faith for her, he did so without question, though not without a wry smile in her direction. When he was done, she dropped the wet rags that were all that remained of his prison garb into the deepest part of the lake and started looking him over critically.

He stood there, unselfconscious of his nakedness even when wet and filthy, but that was just quintessential Zaheer. The fact that she could count his ribs wasn’t great, but at least that way she could tell at a glance that none of them were broken. His skin had a pallor to it she didn’t like, but she couldn’t expect much else about half a year away from the sun. The scars encircling his wrists and ankles and cutting across the bridge of his nose where the blindfold had most heavily borne down made her grind her teeth, but not even a master healer could have done anything with injuries that old. She absently healed all the minor scrapes and bruises that dotted his frame as she circled him before concluding that the worst of it was definitely his eyes.

“Zaheer.” He looked at her attentively, though his slight start when she pressed of a bar of soap into his hand made her painfully aware that he still couldn’t really see what was going on. “Start washing up. I’m going to try fixing your eyes. They’re taking longer to adjust than I’d like.”

He obliged, starting by scrubbing the bar of soap through his hair, though he did say, “Ghazan mentioned something about new skills, but I will admit I’m impressed. Healing is supposed to be one of the most precise of the bending arts.”

“You can be impressed if it works.” It was like she’d thought; the energy paths to his eyes were really messed up, horribly atrophied and partially shredded. But they had not given way entirely, so there was still something for her to work with. “Brace yourself, and try not to blink. This might suck.”

Even when she bended the lake water through the veins of his eyes to get at the nerves that had been damaged, Zaheer didn’t make a sound, though from the purposeful evening out of his breathing she could tell that at the very least it felt strange and uncomfortable. She couldn’t split her concentration enough to offer even the barest words of comfort; the effort required from realigning what had to be the most delicate energy paths in the entire human body was enough by itself to start a headache pulsing between her temples.

Needless to say, the next five minutes weren’t great for either of them, but even through the glow of her healing she could see the cloudiness slowly fade from Zaheer’s vision. By the time she was done, his former sharpness had returned to his gaze, and he was looking upon her with obvious fondness.

She let the water drop back into the lake. “Alright, now you can be impressed.”

“That was amazing. Thank you, Ming-Hua.”

It had always been rather difficult to face Zaheer at his most sincere, so she glanced away, knowing she was failing to completely suppress a blush. “You can thank me by cleaning up quick so we can get out of here.”

He obliged, so it was only a few more minutes before they found themselves back at the edge of the lake, Zaheer sitting cross-legged and still naked to avoid getting dye and strands of hair on his new clothes while Ghazan cut away at the tangle on his head with a pair of scissors. They’d decided previous to the rescue attempt that Zaheer was best disguised with a closely cut beard and left with a few inches of hair to hide the scars on his scalp, dyed black in order to both increase his resemblance to Ghazan and decrease his resemblance to his soon-to-be-made wanted posters. Zaheer put up no protest to this plan as they discussed it over his head, though he might not have heard them at all, his thoughts obviously elsewhere.

The end result of their efforts was kind of uncanny, if only because Ghazan had—seemingly subconsciously, based on the perturbed look he shot Zaheer when he was done—given Zaheer a trim that closely mimicked how he had worn his hair and beard before their ill-fated attempt to kidnap the Avatar more than thirteen years before. It did make Zaheer look absolutely nothing like he had bald, which was what they had been going for, so Ming-Hua let it go without comment, even if the cut combined with the dye—the exact shade of jet black Zaheer’s hair had been before his first stint in prison—gave her a severe case of déjà vu every time she saw him out of the corner of her eye.

If only it were that easy, to go back in time to before everything had gone so horribly wrong.

After the dye had set—a process speeded up with a judicious application of waterbending—they tossed the cut hair into the lake, Zaheer pulled on the robe they had brought him, and they jumped back in the car, this time Ghazan sliding into the driver’s seat since they wanted to avoid attracting attention if they ran across anyone on their way out of the state. That left her out, and neither of them brought up the possibility of putting Zaheer behind the wheel; he was still too quiet to seem entirely all there, much less fit to operate heavy machinery.

This proved a wise decision. About ten minutes after they had gotten back in the car, Ming-Hua turned her head to address a comment to Zaheer, only to find him laid out across the length of the backseat, already out so cold that he had started to drool.

She turned back to the front with smirk that only with valiant effort didn’t turn into a soft smile. She had known Zaheer for well over twenty years (even if they had spent over half of them in different prisons), but most of the time he was so self-contained it made every display of trust precious; no matter how much she derided herself as a sop, it never failed to touch her. “He is _not_ the most graceful sleeper.”

Ghazan didn’t take his eyes from the road. “Can’t blame him. I’m not sure he’s had a good night’s sleep since he was captured.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He said he didn’t dream.”

With anyone else, that would have been a sign of a deep, restful sleep. But Zaheer had always dreamed. It was through his dreams that he had learned to project himself into the Spirit World. It was in his dreams, nearly as much as in his meditation, that he found peace. To have been without for six months…

“Do you think they messed with his connection to the Spirit World?”

Ghazan shook his head. “The prison plans had a note about the volcano being a spiritual void. The White Lotus doesn’t know why, but it only exists on our side.” His hands tightened on the wheel. “Which means he couldn’t project, either.”

Ming-Hua didn’t reply. There was nothing she could say to that.

Their own prisons had been terrible, but at least the guards had been willing to talk to them. Zaheer had been kept more isolated in his prison in the mountains, the White Lotus afraid of his persuading one of the guards to let him escape, but there at least he had been able to project himself into the Spirit World and escape his earthly prison for a time.

To be stuck entirely within his own head, completely alone in the dark, thinking no one was coming for him. For _months_. Even with his nearly inhuman levels of self-discipline, Ming-Hua was honestly surprised that Zaheer was still sane.

It was likely that he wasn’t, at least not entirely. No one could be, after that. The only question was whether Zaheer would ever let them notice. He had always had the best poker face of the four of them.

The four of them. By the spirits. She couldn’t even imagine how Zaheer was dealing with the loss of P’Li. He had held it together well after they had captured the Avatar, but even she could tell that he had just shunted his emotions off to the side as something to deal with later.

Zaheer and P’Li hadn’t been involved when she met them, though that had changed within just a couple of years (mostly at the instigation of P’Li). As far as she knew, they had never had anyone else, and all of them had assumed there never would be, with how deeply the two of them had been wrapped up in each other. But now P’Li—the kindest of them beneath her caustic wit, the little sister Ming-Hua had never known she wanted, who had fixed up Ming-Hua’s hair whenever they had a night free and cooked them all curry so hot that it made even Zaheer cry—was dead.

One day that fact would stop hurting, but even as she thought it, Ming-Hua knew that to be a lie.

\--*--

They made it out of Ho without incident, driving through the day and night with Zaheer sleeping the entire way. Only when they stopped at an inn the evening of the day after his rescue did Zaheer awaken for more than the few minutes it took to relieve himself or consume the box of vegetarian sweet buns Ghazan had bought for him to eat.

By the time they arrived at the inn, she hadn’t slept more than six hours in the past forty, and those had been caught slumped against the door of the Satomobile while Ghazan drove. Ghazan hadn’t slept at all and had done the bulk of the work for the rescue besides, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that when he stepped out of the Satomobile, his legs almost immediately failed him. He would have fallen if Zaheer hadn’t moved quickly to catch him, but even through his exhaustion, he managed to shoot her and Zaheer a grin. “Great job, team. Let’s promise to never have to do this again.”

Ming-Hua smiled back. “Sounds good to me.” At Ghazan’s side, Zaheer was more somber, his focus again having momentarily drifted elsewhere even as he kept his grip on the underside of Ghazan’s arms. Later Ming-Hua would have time to worry about that, but that was later.

Ghazan found his footing after a minute or two, which was good because Ming-Hua didn’t think that walking into the inn with Ghazan’s arm thrown over Zaheer’s shoulders like a drunk would leave the right kind of impression if they wanted to get by unnoticed.

Ming-Hua and Ghazan had reserved connecting rooms on their way past the inn towards Zaheer’s prison, telling the innkeeper that they were heading to pick up Ghazan’s—or rather, Gang’s—brother, Zihao from a small shrine up in the mountains where he was paying his respects and would be back in four days. That meant their rooms were already set up and they could walk in past the front desk without more than nod at the innkeeper, which he seemed to appreciate based on how preoccupied he looked with his radio. They all heard the name ‘Zaheer’ clearly from the radio’s speakers even as they slid the hallway doors closed behind them, but waited to speak until they had all gathered in Ming-Hua and Ghazan’s room, Zaheer seated on a chair while Ming-Hua made herself comfortable perched on top of the dresser. Ghazan somehow found the energy to pace, every step jittery with fatigue. “I told you we should have bought a Satomobile with a radio. Or at least _brought_ our radio instead of leaving it at the house.”

Ming-Hua shrugged. “Whatever they’re saying, it wouldn’t change our plans.”

“We could’ve stayed in the Satomobile instead of going to an inn. I feel exposed here. Why are all inns made of wood? Who thought that was a good idea?”

“Non-benders. Calm down, we’ve talked about this. Fugitives don’t dress well and stay in nice inns. The more respectable our behavior, the less likely we are to be noticed.”

“I overheard enough from the radio to know that your involvement isn’t suspected,” Zaheer said. “It is as the Guru Laghima said-“ He cut himself abruptly, and because she and Ghazan were already looking at him, they both saw the stricken widening of his eyes before he quickly shuttered down his expression, his gaze becoming distant and withdrawn.

No one said anything for a long moment. It was with slow deliberation that Ming-Hua slid off the dresser and onto her feet, feeling oddly like she was approaching an injured polar bear dog as she made her way to Zaheer’s side. Zaheer wasn’t dangerous to them, she reminded herself. If he lashed out, it wouldn’t be at them.

She was still careful not to touch him when she said, “Zaheer-“ but didn’t get any further than that before he pushed himself to his feet and walked towards the door that connected their rooms.

“I’ll see the two of you in the morning.” He hesitated for only a moment at the threshold, glancing over his shoulder at them while still managing to avoid meeting any of their eyes. “Goodnight.” He slid the door shut behind him before Ming-Hua could think of a reply.

Ming-Hua turned her gaze to Ghazan. He was staring at the closed door, looking nearly as disturbed as Zaheer had in that one, awful moment.

“Ghazan. You alright?”

He shook his head before turning to look at her. “He isn’t okay, is he.”

Ming-Hua walked over to Ghazan and leaned her head against his shoulder. “Don’t worry. He will be.” That, at least, she had a chance of making true.

\--*--

She and Ghazan agreed to let the matter slide unless Zaheer brought it up himself, and so they didn’t say anything when he joined him for breakfast, acting as if nothing had happened.

Ghazan had explained to the innkeeper how far they had to travel the next day along with an explanation of how late they’d be arriving and a gold coin in thanks for how accommodating he’d been, so there were a few blankets and bags of food waiting for them outside their rooms when they left at dawn the next morning.

She spent the two weeks it took to get them to Paibao Village—sleeping at inns when they were available, setting up camp off the side of the road when they weren’t—filling Zaheer in on their new backstories, even if she couldn’t quite bring herself to bring up the whole dead wife thing. He had not said P’Li’s name since his rescue, not even once.

For his part, Zaheer seemed amused at the idea of being Ghazan’s brother, and as for her and Ghazan being husband and wife, well. “I am just sorry I missed the ceremony. I do not seem like a very supportive brother.”

Ming-Hua rolled her eyes. “We’re not actually married.”

“We are having sex now, though,” Ghazan added, grinning at them in the back from the driver’s seat.

If he hadn’t been the one driving, she would have smacked him, but Ming-Hua instead limited herself to rolling her eyes again.

Zaheer did not look terribly surprised, which considering she and Ghazan had shared a bed at every inn they had stopped at thus far was about to be expected. He wasn’t blind. Well, anymore. “Then congratulations are still in order. An earthbender can move mountains, but only love can move the soul, and thus may be the greatest force in the universe.” He sounded like he was quoting, but sometimes that was just the way Zaheer spoke.

She could only be glad that when he starting talking like that, long association had taught her that he didn’t actually expect anything profound in return. “We’ll still see if you feel like that after living with me and Ghazan for a few months.” At Zaheer’s blank look, she clarified, “The house is mostly slate and granite, and it turns out Ghazan has some trouble controlling his bending when-“

“Ming-Hua, he _doesn’t_ need to know that.”

“He kind of does,” she retorted, “Considering his room is just down the hall. Your bed frame’s wood,” she told Zaheer, whose expression had stoned over in the way it did when he didn’t know whether to look horrified or laugh and was trying to stop himself from doing either, “So it shouldn’t actually be a problem. I just don’t want you to worry if you hear the house rumbling at night, _because_ ,” this she addressed at Ghazan, “It would be way more embarrassing for him to run into our room at three in the morning expecting to see us getting attacked then telling him now.”

“… good point.”

Zaheer, always the most tactful of them, did his best to redirect the conversation back to where it started. “Is such a great amount of detail for our fabricated histories really necessary? If Ghazan and I were former conscripts of Ba Sing Se’s army, we wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

At least the same question from Ghazan had given her time to come up with a reason for the intricacy of the backstories she had devised for them (that didn’t come down to ‘I had weeks to think about this and I hate plot holes’). “Paibao is pretty big, but it doesn’t get a lot of traffic from outsiders. People are going to be curious about us, and we want our backstories to be consistent with each other and fit us well enough that once someone manages to scratch off the top layer, they won’t go digging further. There is no avoiding attracting some attention, but if there is something juicy but irrelevant for them to find out, hopefully once it comes out it won’t take long for people to lose interest.”

“Fair enough.”

\--*--

“So there actually is a farm.”

They were still getting their stuff inside the house when Zaheer stopped on the porch with two bags over one shoulder and looked over the fields, his face faintly bemused.

Ming-Hua dropped the satchel holding her spare clothes heavily inside the door before moving to join him. “Well, yeah. What were you expecting?”

“I thought it was a metaphor. I didn’t know either of you knew how to farm.”

“We don’t, but I figure a waterbender and an earthbender can’t do too badly. Do you?”

“I read a book once.” At her skeptical look, Zaheer relented. “Most of it was poetry. It was written by a Fire Sage, at any rate; I think Fire Nation crops are accustomed to a different kind of soil.”

“We’ve got about nine months to figure it out,” Ming-Hua said. “We’ve already missed the planting season this year.”

“Do you actually expect us to be here that long?”

She couldn’t quite read the tone of Zaheer’s voice. “Do you have somewhere else you want to go?”

“No. But I feel like I should. The Avatar yet lives.”

“I think we’ve proven pretty definitively that it’s impossible to kill the Avatar in the Avatar State. Just killing Korra as she is won’t do us any good. And if we try anything else big, we’ll get the full force of the White Lotus down on us.”

Zaheer shook his head stubbornly. “We can’t just stay hidden away forever. We have a responsibility.”

If she’d been born with (normal) arms, this would have been the point she put a hand on Zaheer’s shoulder. She did her best to convey the same sentiment by moving further into his line of sight and trying to look sympathetic but resolute (though she was pretty sure she did better with the latter than the former). “I still believe in Xai Bau’s mission as much as you do, but like it or not, we failed. We can’t go back to the Red Lotus, and without their support, we don’t have the resources to operate at a meaningful level that the White Lotus won’t notice. If any petty tyrants crop up in the area, we’ll take them out, but I think we deserve a chance to try living by Xai Bau’s teachings instead of spending the rest of our lives trying to get everyone else to. I want _my_ freedom, with you and Ghazan free alongside me. No more prisons…”

“No more running,” Zaheer said, completing the quote. As well he should. It was him she was quoting. He looked slightly dazed. And… taller than he should have been.

Ming-Hua glanced down at his feet. Yep, definitely floating.

“You know Ghazan and I won’t keep you here against your will. We didn’t help you escape prison again just to hold you back. If you want to go, you can.”

“But,” Ghazan interrupted from beneath them at the foot of the stairs where he had apparently been sitting quietly, startling Ming-Hua, “That doesn’t mean we don’t want you to come back.”

At that, Zaheer shuddered, his face again gaining that stricken cast that had so worried them before. He alighted soundlessly on the porch without ever having seemed to notice that he had left the ground. “I don’t- I can’t-“ Then his face shut down—so cold and emotionless that Ming-Hua briefly wondered if she had imagined the way his eyes had looked just moments before—and he was again hovering in midair, the bags he’d been holding sliding silently off his shoulder to the balcony floor. “I’m going to go meditate. My apologies for leaving you to unpack.” And then he was gone.

“Well,” Ghazan said, levering himself to his feet and stretching with obviously affected indifference, “At least we know he won’t be away long.” When Ming-Hua stared at him, he elaborated, “He didn’t take anything with him.”

“Yeah,” Ming-Hua sighed. “I’m just worried that was kind of the point.”

\--*--

Being back at their house—which had come with the property, albeit in enough disrepair it had taken Ghazan a few hours to get it back into shape—at least meant they had consistent access to a radio, which Ming-Hua made sure to switch on even before she and Ghazan finished putting their traveling clothes away and cleaning off the dust of the road. Word of Zaheer’s escape had become old news by then, but seeing as the only certain information that had been released about it was that at least one metalbender had been involved, the newscasters were reduced to speculation about his current whereabouts and what he planned to do next. The White Lotus had apparently not seen fit to share the existence of the Red Lotus with the world, but they had let it be known that Zaheer could fly, so the actual substance of that speculation came down to “he could be anywhere, and he could be planning anything (but monarchs and despots might do well to hire a few more bodyguards).” The thought of him at a farm in the east of the Earth Kingdom wasn’t even bandied about as a joke.

Zaheer was back by morning, which Ming-Hua found out when she walked into the kitchen after a sleepless night to find him taking congee off the stove. It smelled burnt, but only a little bit, so she took a bowl of it when he held it to her and nodded her thanks. “Find everything okay?” After all, it wasn’t like he had let them give him a tour before he had run off.

He nodded, either purposefully ignoring or not noticing the implied jab. The circles under his eyes were impressive enough that it was possible he had gotten as little sleep as she had. “Yes, thank you. This house is… quite well-appointed.”

Well, that was a loaded way of putting it. Ming-Hua took a bite of her congee before responding, pleased to notice there were chopped spring onions in it. And bamboo shoots. And garlic. And more than a little bit of white pepper.

It was, in fact, the exact way she liked her congee, minus the pork. Which made sense even if Zaheer wasn’t vegetarian, seeing as they’d been gone several weeks and hadn’t bought any meat before they left.

She just wished she could tell if it was just more thanks for breaking him out or an apology for his behavior the previous day.

He was still staring at her expectantly, so she replied, as nonchalantly as she could, “Yeah. I took some gold from the Earth Queen’s treasury before we left Ba Sing Se. Things are cheap outside the big cities, so it’s taken us pretty far.”

She sort of expected censure, so the relief on his face was a bit of a surprise. “… oh. Good.”

“You thought it was something worse?”

His silence was answer enough.

Well, that was insulting. “Oh, come _on_ , Zaheer. Please tell me you have enough respect for us that you didn’t think Ghazan and I were gallivanting all over the Earth Kingdom trying to find you with money robbed from travelers we came across on the road.”

“... Desperation causes people to do many things they wouldn’t otherwise do. I wouldn’t have held it against you.”

“Except that you totally would. You were doing it just a minute ago! You thought you were making congee with stolen vegetables and rice! I bet you weren’t even planning to eat it!”

“By the ancestors,” came Ghazan’s voice from the doorway, “it’s too early in the morning for you two to be arguing about utilitarianism.”

Which meant, of course, that he was immediately dragged into the conversation; it was only when breakfast was over and Ming-Hua was washing the dishes while watching Ghazan give Zaheer a tour of their new fields through the window that she realized she had never gotten a chance to ask Zaheer what exactly had happened the night before.

\--*--

There never really was a chance. Zaheer thanked them gravely for how they had set up his room, the mattress the softest one they could find to hopefully offset the memory of the metal bench he had been forced to sleep on in prison, all four walls covered with bookshelves and stuffed with bending scrolls alongside philosophy and poetry books they had come across in their travels, everything decorated in warm tones that reflected the sun in the early morning light. Ghazan had widened the window as much as he could without threatening the structural integrity of the house, and they’d even found a wind chime to hang from its frame. Of course Zaheer immediately moved the mattress to the floor—she would never understand asceticism—and even then spent most of his nights sleeping outside, if the weather was fine. More than once, Ming-Hua had wandered onto their porch steps for some cold night air after overheating from lying next to Ghazan (there was a reason they still maintained separate bedrooms; being too hot always gave her bad dreams these days), only to turn around after a few minutes to see Zaheer dozing on their roof.

That was actually one of the scenarios Ming-Hua preferred, because then at least she knew where he was. In general, Zaheer wasn’t around a lot, disappearing off into the mountains to meditate, or train, or whatever he did when he wanted to get away from them. Even when he was technically present, there was often a distant look in his eyes with his thoughts obviously a million miles away, or maybe on a different plane of existence altogether; more than once she had called him for dinner, only to realize what had looked like meditation was him projecting into the Spirit World. Even she knew that was a bad idea without someone set to guard him, but either Zaheer had gotten in the habit of doing without in prison (likely), or he didn’t care as much as he should have about the risks of leaving his body unattended (which was the more worrying possibility). Whichever it was (either, or both, or neither), he never asked her or Ghazan to watch over him, no matter how often they told him they were willing to do so. After a while, Ming-Hua stopped bothering to remind him; she knew from experience it was impossible to help someone who didn’t want to be helped. Ghazan persisted, but maybe it was for the best he hadn’t learned that lesson yet. Maybe they’d get lucky; maybe she was wrong.

She and Ghazan kept themselves occupied without Zaheer, trying to give him the space he so obviously craved. They went into Paibao Village—less than an hour away by foot—both together and separately, to buy food and get advice on farming. Ghazan made a few casual friends who he started meeting up with once a week at the village’s biggest tavern to play Pai Sho, while she spent more than a few mornings at the local teahouse listening to gossip while the proprietor let her run through his library of tea, clearly fascinated by how she waterbended it into her mouth.

They were obvious objects of curiosity, but it all seemed benign enough. Ghazan wore clothes with long sleeves and a high neck to hide his tattoos in addition to keeping his face clean shaven and his hair short, which made his appearance more or less indistinguishable from every other Earth Kingdom citizen based on description alone. Her arms (or rather, the lack thereof) were harder to hide, but she also kept her sleeves long so only the locals she encountered regularly had any real occasion to notice, and they were all too polite to comment.

There were a smattering of questions about ‘Gang’s brother, Zihao,’ who never seemed to come into town, but it wasn’t difficult to get those conversations over with quickly. She just had to look sad—it wasn’t hard when thinking about it actually made her so—and speak haltingly about his recent tragedy and his resulting grief. That tended to get murmurs of condolences, guilty looks, and no more questions, which suited her just perfectly. It was a convenient cover story, but it was also a true one and none of their goddamned business.

The townspeople weren’t the problem. Neither was the money, which based on her current estimates would last them a few years even if they never did figure out the whole farming thing. She didn’t even get sick of Ghazan, who had the sense to keep things low-key and the romantic gestures to a minimum, even if she did catch him staring at her soppily more than once when he thought she wasn’t looking.

No, things were actually pretty great, on the surface. Which really just left Zaheer.

She couldn’t even really call him a problem. The problem was that she couldn’t really call him anything. He… existed. He ate. He slept. He meditated. He read. He did his part of the cleaning and the food preparation. But there was a void. He was in and out of the house often enough, but sometimes it felt like they hadn’t managed to rescue Zaheer at all. That some part of him had been left buried under the volcano. Or, as posited by Ghazan one day, had died with P’Li. It had been months, and Zaheer still had yet to mention her name.

What happened on the anniversary of her death finally brought things to a head. Zaheer had been on one of his several-day jaunts into the mountains, so they hadn’t really expected to see him that night when he walked in on them arguing over the spiciness of the curry.

“I’m telling you, I took a bite and can still feel the inside of my mouth. It isn’t hot enough,” said Ghazan.

“Yeah, well, if you haven’t noticed, my eyes are watering just from smelling it. We’re trying to honor her, not make ourselves sick.”

“I told you, it wasn’t nearly so bad if you dumped in some yoghurt when she wasn’t looking-“

“What are you doing?”

Ming-Hua stiffened. Ghazan managed not to—or had sensed Zaheer landing outside and genuinely hadn’t been surprised, the bastard—and just gave a nonchalant shrug. “Trying to remake P’Li’s chili banana curry. We’re having a difference of opinion over whether it’s spicy enough.” He held out a spoon in Zaheer’s direction. “Thoughts?”

The way Zaheer stared at the spoon, it might as well have been a spider snake about to bite him. Except Zaheer wouldn’t have panicked at the sight of a spider snake. “Why would you make this?” It was technically a question; questions just usually didn’t come out so deeply cold that—had Zaheer been a waterbender—Ming-Hua wouldn’t have been surprised to see frost emanating from his mouth.

She knew Ghazan noticed. She also knew Ghazan was as sick as the current state of affairs as she was. He did not lower the spoon. “P’Li died a year ago today. We’re making it in her memory. Ming-Hua and I were planning on eating it, possibly destroying our stomach linings in the process, then getting uproariously drunk and telling stories about the most awesome things P’Li ever exploded. My personal favorite remains that one komodo rhino that charged us when we were trying to find a place to set up her eighteenth birthday picnic, since then we also got to have a barbeque for dinner.” When Zaheer didn’t move, Ghazan softened his tone. “You should join us. She would like that you remembered her.”

“I-“ For a moment, Zaheer looked torn, before the walls Ming-Hua had come to dread even more than the sight of his pain slammed down over the vulnerability in his eyes. “No. P’Li is beyond liking anything.” He strode out of the room before either of them could stop him, but glancing at Ghazan, Ming-Hua knew that neither of them intended to let him get far.

\--*--

He was already past the front porch and several feet into the air by the time they caught up with him.

Ming-Hua called out to him, “Zaheer!” But when he didn’t even turn to glance at her, she gave up on talking and bended most of the water out of their well, tendriling it around Zaheer’s ankles even as Ghazan ripped out the porch railings and threw them into the air above Zaheer’s head.

Zaheer obviously hadn’t been expecting an attack; he stared down at them for a long few seconds, confusion writ large on his face, which was long enough for her to freeze his feet in a block of ice and use it to slam him into the dirt. Not hard enough to do more than stun, but that still gave Ghazan enough time to bend the railings into makeshift shackles and secure Zaheer to the ground before he got his bearings.

It took approximately three seconds for Zaheer to realize that he wasn’t going to be getting up anytime soon. It took less than thirty for Ming-Hua to realize that Zaheer had managed in less than half a minute to work himself up into a full-blown panic attack, already shaking hard enough that she noticed it even standing twenty feet away by only the light of the waxing moon. Shit.

“Drop the bending and just grapple him,” she snapped at Ghazan, who nodded and quickly complied. She half-expected Zaheer to have been faking it and break Ghazan’s nose as soon as one of his hands were free, but he didn’t stop shaking, and it wasn’t long before Ghazan sighed and his tight hold on Zaheer loosened, pulling Zaheer up from the dirt and into his arms.

The hug started one-sided but quickly became not as Zaheer grabbed onto Ghazan like he was drowning, still shaking when he buried his face into the crook of Ghazan’s neck. Ming-Hua couldn’t follow Ghazan’s example, for obvious reasons, but she still allowed herself a loud sigh as well before walking over to sit down before Ghazan and leaning her back against Zaheer’s, who by that point had stopped shaking but was still shuddering every time he took a breath.

The five minutes it took Zaheer’s breathing to even out were not the longest of Ming-Hua’s life, but they likely numbered among the most important.

Zaheer loosened his grip on Ghazan then, but he did not move away. He still managed to sound faintly accusatory when he said, “You promised me no more prisons.”

“You promised us no more running,” Ming-Hua snapped back, feeling oddly raw and in no mood to coddle him, but neither did she feel any inclination to stop using him as a backrest. “You broke your word first.”

Then they didn’t talk for a while, though Ghazan absently rubbed circles on Zaheer’s back with one hand while the other reached over Zaheer and lay softly on Ming-Hua’s shoulder.

It ended up being Zaheer who again broke the silence. This time his voice held no anger, though it sounded as raw as Ming-Hua felt. “I cannot think about her. She’s been dead for a year, but even now the memory of her keeps me grounded. The pain of it is as fresh as the moment I watched her fall.

“It is no tradeoff for the sky.”

“That sky you love so much has done nothing but take you away from us,” Ming-Hua hissed, unable to contain her venom. “Do you think Ghazan and I didn’t love her, that the memory of her doesn’t hurt us? She was our sister. She was the only woman I’ve ever met who made me feel like I wasn’t a crippled freak, the only one of us who laughed at even the stupidest of Ghazan’s jokes. Don’t be so selfish as to think you’re the only one who has suffered.

“She’s gone; we can’t change that. But there is no way in hell we’re going to lose you too. ” She felt Ghazan tightening his grasp on both of them, a silent agreement.

At her back, she felt Zaheer still himself for a long moment, then slide out from Ghazan’s grip and to his feet. Both she and Ghazan tensed, but he didn’t go anywhere, just stood next to them and looked up at the moon for a time before exhaling sharply and reaching down to help her and Ghazan to their feet as well.

“Come on. Let’s go back inside before P’Li’s curry boils over.”

\--*--

A waterbending master, an earthbending master, and an airbending prodigy attempt to work a farm. What happens?

Well, if they have no prior agricultural experience and barely any idea of what they are doing, it turned out basically nothing. Not one of Ghazan’s better punchlines.

“We are terrible farmers,” Ming-Hua pronounced. It was early summer in the year 173 AG, and there was absolutely nothing growing. Admittedly they had decided that year to go with a test crop of cabbage and wheat that covered only three acres instead of the full thirty they owned, so they hadn’t wasted that much money on seeds, but none of them were used to anything but near-effortless mastery of any skills they attempted to learn, and their lack of it here left all of them feeling grumpy.

Ghazan probably took it best, just giving a resigned shrug at the total lack of plant growth before them. “Well, fortunately I didn’t quit that job tending bar at the tavern, and we still have some of the Earth Queen’s gold. We’re not going to starve.”

“Not the point,” snapped Zaheer, who somehow had managed to take it even worse than Ming-Hua. She had just realized that she hated farming; he had taken their failure as a personal affront. Neither she nor Ghazan had any idea why, though Ghazan had quipped that perhaps the farm had turned out to be a metaphor after all. “We have proven ourselves inadequate caretakers of this land. To let it just sit there unused is a waste."

He didn’t mention the bandits. He didn’t need to. They had done what they could to keep them away from Paibao, but that still left the roads leading up to the village unguarded, and these days hardly any shipments got through.

She knew he still felt guilty about that. For all his usual pragmatism, Zaheer had more than a few idealist blind spots, and for some reason he had thought that the death of the Earth Queen would lead to everyone minding their own business instead of just fucking over each other in a thousand petty ways, in comparison to the Earth Queen’s two or three big ones. Not a net gain for the world, overall, but also not a big surprise. Not everyone thought the Air Nomads’ way of life worth emulating, and the Red Lotus had not acted to deal with those most egregiously taking advantage of the chaos as originally planned. They either couldn’t, because of the White Lotus, or simply didn’t, because they no longer had to keep Zaheer pacified and didn’t actually give a shit. Most of the Red Lotus had never even met Xai Bau, much less studied under the man as Zaheer had in the last years before the old man’s death. A lot of them just wanted to see the world torn down; they didn’t care what happened after.

Paibao was doing okay, or at least thanks to them had avoided getting raided, but Zaheer still wasn’t wrong about their farm.

“We could just lend it out for cheap next year,” she said. “There are actual farmers in the area who’d be glad for a chance to let a few of their own fields lay fallow for a season to help the soil recover.”

That ended up being what they did the next spring, but no longer bothering with the farming meant they all suddenly had a lot more free time, and none of them dealt well with idleness.

The one side benefit to the bandits was that with the marked decrease in visitors, hardly anyone that they didn’t already know ever came into Paibao, which meant Zaheer became a lot less paranoid about going into town. His wanted posters had long since been torn down in favor of criminals more recently on the public’s mind and had never looked much like him anyway, so they had all agreed that for the most part, the time when any of them were likely to be recognized had passed. This led to all of them spending a lot more time in Paibao, and it did not take long before his constant presence at the public library and his talks with its librarian and Paibao’s elders made most of the village aware that Zaheer was by far the most educated man any of them had ever met. The fact that he actually liked kids meant that when the old schoolteacher retired later that year, he soon found himself inundated with requests to take the job.

He at first refused, but when one of the cuter brat’s mothers pointed out that there weren’t a lot of options since no one from the cities dared to come out as far east as Paibao anymore, Ming-Hua could actually see the shift in Zaheer’s expression as his guilt kicked in. “I see. Then I accept your most gracious offer, though I warn you I have no teaching experience. You will have to be patient with me.”

It turned out that Zaheer was a natural teacher and the kids absolutely loved him. Of course.

Paibao’s doctor died in the early winter. Upon hearing the news, Ming-Hua immediately regretted agreeing to Zaheer’s request to heal the youngest Fu kid’s broken arm when he had fallen off a tree two months before. “Just you wait. Mayor Huang is going to come by within the next day and beg me to take over for Sifu Lan. She didn’t have any apprentices.”

“That’s what happens when you fall down some stairs and break your neck at forty-five,” Ghazan agreed. “No one sees it coming. But you don’t have to agree, you know.”

What a lie that was. Mayor Huang’s younger brother owned the teashop, and she’d never be able to drink there again without him bothering her if she refused. “You are _so_ full of shit.”

Her prediction proved correct, of course, though she made it clear that unless someone was actually dying, she would only be available for a few hours a day and only on weekdays; the times Zaheer was teaching, in fact, and covering most of Ghazan’s shifts at the tavern. After all, they only had the one Satomobile, and walking back and forth between their house and the village was a nightmare in the winters for anyone but Ming-Hua. It was too close to the equator for much snow, but the torrential rains that froze over at night more than made up for it.

After that, things… kind of escalated.

“Why are we going to this wedding? Do we even know these people?”

“It’s Master Carpenter Rong’s youngest son marrying Little Shu’s older sister,” Zaheer said, straightening out his formal robes before looking them over critically in a mirror. “I believe Shu’s mother invited me because she wanted to discuss adding traditional characters to the curriculum for the older students next year. You received an invitation because back in early spring you were dragged down to the village in the middle of the night because Rong’s wife’s fever had spiked, and he still feels like he owes you something. As for Ghazan-”

“Hey,” said Ghazan, retying his belt for what was probably the fifth time (even though Ming-Hua thought it had looked fine after the first attempt), “you can’t blame me for this; I’m just a bartender. They only included me on Ming-Hua’s invitation because it would be rude to invite the village doctor to a wedding and not include her husband.”

None of that actually answered Ming-Hua’s first question. “So… we’re going why?”

Zaheer and Ghazan glanced at each other.

“Well, it would be impolite to refuse at this point.”

“Yin’s restaurant is doing the catering, so the food should be good.”

“… Right.”

\--*--

It wasn’t actually that bad, but she still felt more than a little claustrophobic from the amount of people present at the temple and at the party after. Ghazan seemed fine—one of his friends was tending bar and seemed to have no problem with giving him all the sake he wanted on the house—but Zaheer apparently had similar sentiments, because he made no objection when she suggested making their excuses and leaving half an hour into the reception.

It had been an evening wedding and he’d definitely had at least one more cup of sake than he should have, so she wasn’t terribly surprised that Ghazan fell asleep in the back of their Satomobile sometime in the first thirty seconds of the ten minutes it took them to drive back to their house.

She didn’t really blame him. “At least he had a good time.”

From the driver’s seat, Zaheer shot her an amused look. “Did you not?”

“Nah. Too many people. Nice group, but very touch-y. I felt hemmed in, you know?”

“There are worse things.”

Ming-Hua glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “You agreed to leave; I thought you felt the same.”

“You were unhappy. That was reason enough alone.”

“Well, I didn’t have to agree to attend. Neither did you. To be honest I’m kind of surprised you did.”

He frowned at that, looking perplexed. “Why?”

“Well, it was a wedding. A celebration of ‘earthly tethers’ if I’ve ever seen one. Not really your deal.”

They arrived at the house a few minutes later. Zaheer stopped the Satomobile but did not immediately get out, choosing instead to rest his forehead against the steering wheel. Ming-Hua stayed in the Satomobile as well, and waited.

It wasn’t long before he raised his head and turned to her, looking her steadily in the eye. “I owe you and Ghazan an apology. I was a coward. I abandoned you when I should have been at your side, and I have no better excuse than being too afraid to face my own grief and too selfish to notice yours.”

Zaheer hesitated for a long moment then, some internal struggle apparent in the tightening around his mouth and eyes. Ming-Hua took a breath in through her nose before wetting her own lips to speak, but despite knowing that she should have _some_ response, she found herself as much at a loss for words as Zaheer seemed to be. She was therefore rather thankful when Zaheer quickly held up a hand and said, “Please be patient with me. This has proven more… difficult, than I thought it would be, but I have left some things unsaid for too long.

“Guru Laghima was a wise man. I thought I was following his example, but he was not able to attain weightlessness until his wife and children were long since dead. He tended to his earthly concerns before moving on to more worldly ones. I just gave mine up, and in so doing perverted his teachings.

“No matter how high I flew, it felt… empty. Fulfillment of a lifelong dream, and it might as well have been nothing. And that feeling extended to everything, even that which I knew mattered most. I cannot imagine Guru Laghima would have aspired to flight if it meant he had to strip himself of his care for the world he held so dear.

“I don’t think I am still able to fly. I haven’t tried in over a year. But I think that is as it should be. I think Guru Laghima would approve. Absent the mental component, weightlessness is just to become physically unbound from the earth. It is meaningless outside of the emotional state the accomplishment is supposed to represent. And I felt far more at peace lying in P’Li’s arms than I ever did in the sky.

“So I wanted to apologize. And I wanted to thank you. It was only because of you and Ghazan that I realized before it was too late that I didn’t need to let go of my earthly tethers in order to be free.”

She remained silent. What was there to say to that? How could there be anything _to_ say, in the face of such an admission? But she didn’t look away, and neither did Zaheer.

The silence was seconds away from becoming uncomfortable when from the back seat, Ghazan drawled, “I really feel like we should be hugging right now.”

She was startled into laughing, and it was not more than a few seconds before Zaheer’s disgruntled expression gave way to him again resting his head against the steering wheel in an obvious attempt to hide a smirk. And that was when she knew that everything would be alright.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope people enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. I just recently made my way through Book 3 and what there is of Book 4, and I really liked the Book 3 villains and wrote all of this in a three-day spree (which was less than a week before my story was completely Jossed by Book 4, Episode 9, but what can you do). I have an idea for a sequel (as I am enjoying Book 4 quite a bit as well), but I won't have the time to dedicate to it until Christmas at the earliest, which is actually sort of convenient as Book 4 should be done by then. If I ever do get around to the sequel, the end of this story will be have a line added, because I enjoy putting characters I like through hell: "But everything changed when the Earth Empire arrived."


End file.
